The Relative Merits of Plastic Bottles and Concrete Slabs
Chris Turner
287835581_576077b773_280.jpgThe other day, I found myself preaching to the choir out in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I was the keynote speaker at the annual fundraiser for the Ecology Action Centre, a longstanding and highly regarded environmental organization with deep roots in the region. The event drew a good-sized crowd, and the usual suspects – hardcore environmentalists, activists, academics, the odd self-interested local politician – formed the bulk of it. I’m sure you could find a similar crowd in any good-sized North American city, which is why the two most significant memes I encountered at this talk strike me as having broad significance to the sustainability movement in general.
Let’s start with the first meme, which sported what I think of as an outdated shade of green. I was returning from the washroom to the auditorium shortly before my talk, and a young woman milling near the entrance pointed at the Dasani water bottle I was clutching in my hand and said something like, You’re not really bringing that to an environmental lecture, are you? I shrugged and explained it was all they had at the event’s temporary bar, and I needed something to keep my throat wet through all that talking. At which point it dawned on her that I was the speaker that evening, and she got sort of embarrassed and mildly apologetic.
I partially conceded her point – I’d have chosen a reusable glass of tap water if it’d been available, after all – and she sort of conceded mine, though I could tell she’d have held her ideological ground if I’d been anything less than the evening’s main act. What I mean is, I think from her point of view she was letting me get away with it. Dasani bottles still had no business at events like these, but if anyone could be forgiven, maybe the speaker could.
The topic came up again after my presentation, during the Q&A. A different young woman, the same pointed question, asked this time in front of the whole audience: How could you possibly deliver an hour-long presentation on sustainability with a plastic water bottle resting there on the podium next to your notes? She was angrier than my first anti-plastic interrogator; I could tell she was a little apprehensive to rain on my positive-solutions parade, but clearly the Dasani-logoed bottle so completely equated in her mind to the very essence of the problem that it couldn’t pass without comment.
I’ll come to my response in a minute. But first let me tell you the other significant meme I encountered at this event – the one coloured bright green.
The book-signing line after my lecture was a pretty standard cross-section of the sort of people who not only attend talks like mine but approach the speaker afterward to hand over a business card or brochure. There were green-energy advocates, Kyoto petitioners, local-food organizers, semi-coherent defenders and demonizers of nuclear power. And one gentleman who slid me a business card identifying himself as Robert Niven, president of Carbon Sense Solutions. He mentioned a mutual friend and said I should try to make time see what his young company was doing with concrete before I headed home.
A couple days later, I drove out to an industrial park near the airport to see what he was talking about. I found Robert in a small office building on the fringe of a vast field of concrete apparatus – great stacks of drainage pipe, piles of industrial-sized brick, mammoth slabs used to build bridges and overpasses. Carbon Sense Solutions had only recently emerged from a lab at McGill University in Montreal, and it was now nested on the premises of a company called the Shaw Group – your standard regional concrete manufacturing giant.
Robert noted by way of introduction that cement and concrete production constitute the planet’s third largest source of carbon dioxide emissions after energy production and transportation, and then he explained at length what he intended to do about that. I realized within minutes that although I trod upon concrete every day of my life, I’d never once thought about where it came from or how it was made. Turns out that the production of cement (one of the constituent ingredients in concrete) involves cooking limestone in a kiln at nearly 1000 degrees, a process called “calcination” hat requires an enormous amount of energy to carry out and releases vast stores of carbon dioxide from the limestone itself in the process. As much as two-thirds of the emissions created by concrete production are generated by calcination, with the rest contributed by the kiln’s fuel.
The concrete industry, Robert explained, had been focused on the latter problem for years, greatly increasing the efficiency of its energy use – mainly for baseline economic reasons. Much less thought, however, had been paid to the emissions created by calcination. Which is where Carbon Sense comes in.
To produce concrete, cement is mixed with water and gravel and then cured; in large industrial facilities, the curing agent is traditionally steam. Robert’s company is working on a new industrial process by which the waste emissions of the cement production process would be injected back into the concrete as the curing agent – essentially reconstituting the limestone and re-capturing the carbon dioxide (amounting to a total emissions reduction by as much as 50 percent compared to the current industry norm).
This was still in test phase, but Robert didn’t need to spell out for me how enormous the potential was. I live a life practically encased in concrete. We all do. To turn modernity’s most ubiquitous building material into a sequestration project that could quickly and easily span the globe? And to do so through a straightforward, technically simple retrofit of existing plants? I left in a state of quiet awe – not something I ever expected to happen to me at a concrete factory.
Which brings me back to the plastic-bottle meme I’d encountered at my talk, and the distance between that question and the Carbon Sense approach to solving the climate problem. When I was asked about the water bottle at the lecture, I answered mostly in general terms. The scope of the climate crisis, I said, was so huge that it can only be solved by a society-wide shift, a total shift. Either everything changes – and does so within a generation, give or take – or as far as the biosphere’s concerned it’ll be as if nothing has. The only question, then, is how best to create that universal change.
My response was to suggest that such a broad shift in human behaviour in such a short time would by necessity make for strange bedfellows and imperfect optics. Some of the people (maybe even the most important ones) creating that change will have different priorities and different fundamental values from those of old-school environmentalism. To cite an example, I talked about how Wal-Mart’s sustainability push might ultimately be more significant than anything going on down at the local organic co-op. After my visit to the concrete factory, I had a better case in point.
My use of a plastic water bottle to keep hydrated during my lecture was personal, symbolic, highly visible and statistically meaningless; Carbon Sense’s attempt to turn the world’s concrete factories into carbon sinks is universal, practical, invisible and statistically huge.
The water bottle was a gesture, a sort of purity ritual, a thing built to the same scale as a protest placard. The underlying assumption is that if enough of us foreswear plastic, the planet will in time return to the same balance it maintained before we ever started cracking oil molecules to build polymer chains and wrap them around practically everything we use on a daily basis.
The carbon-sequestering concrete initiative is less righteous but more fundamental in its impact. It recognizes that whatever comes of this shift to sustainability, it is not a return to any previous norm, pre-industrial or otherwise. And it recognizes, moreover, that the scope of the problem is the size of the biosphere itself, and by necessity it must include not just the meetings of the tuned in and turned on but also the concrete poured to erect the buildings those meetings are held in.
That’s all the concrete we pour, by the way, from here to Timbuktu, from the organic co-op to the new exurban Wal-Mart. Much as we’d also like to see the end of exurban big-box development altogether, it’s likely – strange bedfellows again – that more than a few will be built before we’re all aboard the new paradigm, and so at the very least we can reduce the carbon footprint of their building materials in the meantime. And the larger point remains that we’ll make that larger shift not just because we make public gestures against plastic bottles but also – mainly – because some whipsmart engineers figure out how to turn concrete into a carbon sink.
No comments:
Post a Comment